


Nest

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Anal Fisting, Episode Tag, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Innuendo, Paranoia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:11:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5229878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his dream there is a grail, and a questing hero. Post-"Sleep No More "</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nest

The Doctor does sleep, and sleep deeply, despite occasional claims and boasts to the contrary. And he dreams, sometimes. The same dream, iterated, paths splintering away from the center. In his dream there is a grail and a spear, and the Fisher King is approaching. A question is asked. _Who are you_ , or _what are you_ , or _what are you capable of?_

Or maybe it's something as simple as _what is it that you want?_  


* * *

  
"You've got quite a knack for getting stuck in small spaces," he says. "Just because you _can_ fit inside cupboards doesn't mean you should keep hopping in."

Clara and her long-suffering sigh. "Take me places with no evil Space Cupboards and I won't have to investigate them. Simple. Besides, we both play our part, yeah? You get the things on the top shelf and I fit into the nooks and crannies. Peas in a pod."

She's got that look: cocky, knowing. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as she meanders around the console, fingers trailing over the buttons and levers. She eases up alongside him, tucks herself into the crook of his arm. Fingers trailing over his buttons and - lever.

So much Clara in such limited square footage. She's dense, is what she is. No, wrong word - she's compact. All that she is, all the rage and love and kindess and stubbornness and all of the rest, compressed down into an efficient package. Like one of those inflatable rafts which in their dormant state can be carried around one-handed.

He knows what it's like to be more than what your skin can hold. He wonders if she admits it to herself, admits to the itch, that crowded, bursting-at-the-seams feeling. To be too much of yourself and then Dalek, Zygon, Sandmen on top of that. He wonders if that bothers her. He wonders if she'd tell him if it did.  


* * *

  
In his dream there is a grail, and a questing hero. He is sometimes the hero, Clara is sometimes the grail. Clara is sometimes both the grail and the hero. He is sometimes the grail, and sometimes not anything at all. He doesn't pretend to know what dreams are on about, honestly. It's almost entirely nonsense. Even if some of it sticks when he wakes, and diligently scrubs the crust from the corners of his eyes. Even if he carries the ghost of it around with him throughout the day, like a half-remembered song he can't get out of his head.  


* * *

  
She's fucking him. Face-down on the bed they've been sharing, lately. Legs shaking as she spreads them. Relax, relax. Her fingers, nails close-cut, slicked and warm, parting his arse cheeks, probing. He bucks shamelessly into the mattress. Feeling his brain just sort of - detach.

Times like this he's like a hot-air balloon, tethered but with slack in the line. Drifting off, waiting for the yank back. Needing it, really. Wanting it more than anything. And the rope, in the analogy, the rope that is holding him here and now and present in his body, in this room, with Clara: the rope unspooling.

Vessels that hold other vessels. Russian nesting dolls. Worlds within worlds. The foreign bodies in her head, and her hand inside him, and the two of them in this ship, and the ship herself in time's crucible. Look hard enough for a symbol and you'll find it. The grail, the spear. Maybe he's reading too much into it. Which he would, wouldn't he, he's been doing that a lot these days. There he goes, a million miles away again.

Clara has one hand firm on his hip, the other twisting, crooking. The tether pulls taut. Like re-entering the atmosphere, falling towards the planet in a parabolic arc. She's his gravity, these days, which he'd be concerned about if he had any thoughts, any thoughts at all left in his head.  


* * *

There's a song he's been playing, on the guitar. He likes to think he's not so much writing it as uncovering it, note by beat by bar. Something buried in the sand, and he is digging it out.

Her footsteps are light but he can feel the vibrations, feel her come up close behind him. She slides her arms around him, pulls his hand away from the fret. The indents from the strings still marking his fingertips.

"Van Halen again?"

"Ah. Well. Partially. Partially other things."

"Mmm. Sounded good, whatever it was. You're getting better. And I suppose I should thank you for not just playing "Miserlou" over and over. Anyway. Fancy a break?" She's pulling his hand back behind him, pressing it between her thighs.

A break, why not. All the good riffs are already taken, anyway.  


* * *

  
She is locked in a cell and she is dying;  
She is locked in a cell and he is rescuing her;  
She is locked in a cell and she is rescuing herself;  
She is locked in a cell and it turns out to not be much of an immediate threat.

They're always getting in and out of scrapes, he'd argue. Since he left home, his companions have been getting locked in cells, it's sort of just one of the things they _do_. If you look for a pattern, you'll find it; a Dalek casing is not a Zygon pod is not a corporate-dystopia sleep-be-gone chamber, the coincidence only turns into a connection because he's afraid of what that would mean.

(But then again: the universe has tried to tell him things before. The hybrid, the grail.)  
(The _womb_.)  


* * *

  
He stares straight into her eyes as he comes inside her and is utterly convinced she is now carrying their child. This turns out to be untrue. He checks, surreptitiously, although probably she knows what he's doing - checks her on the TARDIS monitor under some thin pretense or other, the suspicion of a bacterial infection, sentient fungus, whatever, he's not paying attention to what comes out of his mouth. But there's nothing, no hint, no spark, not the faintest potential.

Clara Oswald is 100% not even a little bit pregnant. He knows this for certain because he re-checks on several occasions, spread out over a week or two, and he re-re-checks for the very last time as she rolls her eyes and taps her foot and begs him to just get on with it, already, and stop fussing over her like some paranoid mother hen.

And he sighs, not sure whether it's out of relief or disappointment or what. Is it something he wants? Something he fears? Or did he just expect it because it would fit the narrative?

(Children are difficult and sticky and terrifying, and frankly tedious. Children couldn't follow them where they're going. Absence does not equate to loss. It's not loss, what he's feeling right now. Whatever the name of this emotion is, it's not that.)  


* * *

  
They find a planet devoid of Evil Space Cupboards and ghosts and war. Not even a distress signal. To be fair, it's devoid of people altogether. There's an automated outpost, a little self-sufficient modular unit plunked down on the edge of a tiny island. And there's the sea.

As far as visitor centers go, it's terrible. There is a vending machine, though, so there's that. He picks through a pouch of trail mix for the chocolate bits while she presses her hands, her whole face against the window, nose probably smushed. Breath steaming on the glass.

"Diamond rain," he says, spitting out a craisin. "Refracts the light. That's what you're seeing, if you were wondering."

The cliff face drops sharply, five feet of black rock and then nothing. The sea stretches out to the horizon, pearl-grey and roiling. Clouds scuttling past, iridescent, whipped into ribbons by the wind. He spits out another craisin. Who invented craisins, anyway?

There's a button they could push to listen to the storm, another button to hear soothing music, another five for information in Galactic Standard, Esperanto, and three languages he won't admit to not having heard of. They don't push any of the buttons. There's just his breathing, and her breathing, and the squeak of his boots on the linoleum, and the tap-a-tap of her heels as she drifts between windows, and the scritch of her stockinged thighs sliding against each other.

And silence, otherwise.

She takes out the security cameras with the sonic sunglasses, striking a pose. Probably someone somewhere was hearing an alarm. Be days before any of the local ships would make it, if they bother at all. He has time. What he needs the time for is up for debate.

Or not, alternately, up for debate at all: she lifts up to tip-toes and pulls him down and they meet somewhere in the middle. So this, then. She's not rough but she is in a hurry, hungry; one hand fumbling at his belt buckle, the other yanking her stockings and panties down. Doesn't take much to get him hard. Partially a risque party trick he learned as an adolescent, partially because, well. It's Clara.

She hops up, which he'd kind of sort of been expecting, but it still half knocks the wind out of him. This creature suddenly in his arms, riding him. It's fine, it's good, it's not as startling as it'd been the first time. He's strong enough to hold her, anyway. And she's light enough. She gasps into his mouth as her legs clamp around his hips, his coat bunching up around her thighs.

(She likes the velvet, he thinks, which is one of the reasons he wears it. The other being that it just looks cool.)

He crumples afterward, like he tends to, slips right down to the ground. She follows. At some point she'd started the Esperanto audio. All sounds the same, with the translation matrix, but he does like knowing what it would have been, could he have heard it. The accent around the edges, the quirks of language. They learn about the planet, and they lie together, Clara on top, her slight body feeling like a ten-ton weight pressing down on him.

"You're moping again," she murmurs, toying with his lapel. "Want to talk about it?"

The rising and falling of her chest against his, the planet spinning beneath his back. Artificial gravity. The pneumatic hiss of automated hydroponics somewhere off to the left of them. A thousand and one things to think about other than the thing he should be thinking about.

It's not much of a story. "Nothing Happened And I Feel Sad For Reasons I Cannot Adequately Explain". Hardly a ripping yarn. But they should talk, shouldn't they. Communication is key.

Except he gets it all wrong, of course. "D'you ever think you might be happier settled down? With a family, white picket fence, 2.5 kids, all that?"

She pushes herself up, pointy elbows digging into his ribs. She glares, he wheezes. She thinks he's being condescending again, asking loaded questions, implying she didn't mean or understand the decision she made to stay with him. Which, fair enough.

"Didn't mean it like that," he gasps out.

"So how'd you mean it?"

"I think about it," he says. Aiming for the steamroll-through-til-maybe-it-makes-sense conversational technique. "I mean. I had a family, once. I messed it up, it, they-" Faltering. So much history, and so little of it he's ever been able to come to terms with, let alone remember how after all this time, let alone know how to properly convey what any of it means. Pause. Regroup. "But I wonder. What my life would have been like, if I'd...been a different man, I suppose. If I were a different man now. Would I be happier if I had a family?"

"You have me," she says. Punches him on the arm lightly, then settles back down, head nestled below his chin. "But yeah, it's different. I think. I assume, I mean I've never - you know. But it's a choice, isn't it. Kids or adventure, home or abroad. Can't do both, not the way we do it."

"The Fantastic Four did. Terrible example, though, I don't particularly want to be compared to Mr Fantastic, he - what. Not a comic book fan, I take it."

"Used to read Beano. This is about those scans, yeah? You thought you were being all sneaky, which is cute, but you don't - you know I want you to tell me, if you think something's up. Instead of going behind my back. Especially something like that."

"I knew that you knew," he whispers. Didn't mean to whisper, just came out like that. Voice too thick and too shaky, too much emotion. Foreign bodies crowding his throat.

"I'm on space contraceptives. From the space pharmacy. For all the, you know, space diseases. And space babies."

"I know."

Maybe it's because he didn't rise to the obvious bait, but she stops being flippant. She curls down around him, somehow gets even smaller, simultaneously more present. The mystery that is Clara Oswald.

"I made my choice," she says. Her voice is a hell of a lot steadier than his was. "For better or for worse."

"Same," he says, or kind of says, because it comes out as this awful, hoarse, barely-audible thing. But it's enough. He hopes it's enough.  


* * *

  
The Doctor sleeps, and he dreams: the grail, the hero. Heroes. The Fisher King bearing down on them both, and they run. Oh, how they run.


End file.
